More than a job
by robot-ninja-wizard accountant
Summary: A little drabble about Katagiri and why she is working for the Ishida family. Katagiri POV. spoilers 530.


A little drabble about why Katagiri works for the Ishida and why she is so fine with all that Quincy talk going on around her. Somehow I don't think that Kubo will go back and give her lots of back-story, but with the high possibility of her being Uryuu's mom you never know. I don't own anything.

There were much worse jobs in the world than as household help for the Ishida family. The pay was good. The work usually was not too labor-intensive. The family was for the most part very nice. The son was the most gorgeous boy that Katagiri had ever laid eyes on. The last big perk was that you didn't have to worry much about hollow attacks.

The Ishida family owned a rather large house that took several people to run, and all the people who worked for the family were hired for two things: the quality of their work, their knowledge of the supernatural. While the Ishida's and the Kurosaki girl who lived with them were the only full blood Quincy, most of the staff had some Quincy blood. Katagiri's grandmother had been the last full-blood Quincy in her family. Katagiri could definitely sense hollows but didn't really have the strength to do much about getting rid of them. Working for the Ishida's meant that she had someone to help take care of the hollows that the little Quincy blood that she had inherited seemed to attract.

It isn't odd for families with small amounts of Quincy blood to somewhat cling to the stronger clans for protection. Katagiri had learned to stick with the Ishida through personal experience. There had been one occasion where she had tried to get outside work, she had been a cashier at a retail store, but it ended when hollows attacked and almost entirely destroyed the poor little shop. Kankura town gets a much bigger crime rate than it really should because of all the hollow activity, but after all the years that have gone by most people have just assumed that the police aren't very good rather than question about possible supernatural causes. Katagiri might not get blamed for the accidents that would occur, but she realized she could go on risking the safety of others that way. After that, Katagiri had resigned herself to the idea that she would work for the Ishida for the rest of her working life.

So maybe she was more or less stuck with the job, but that did not mean that she hated it. The thing that helped Katagiri whenever she felt trapped by her future was the feeling that the Ishidas' needed her just as much as she needed them. Maybe that was just wishful thinking, but sometimes Katagiri felt that she was Ryuuken's closest confidant. She had never know him to have many close friends and so often any real conversation between him and his mother, or him and Masaki seemed strained. Katagiri had learned that being a Quincy is crazy whether you are a full blood Quincy or a not-even-worth-giving-the-name-Quincy kind of Quincy like her. She learned that it is something that you need to talk about if you don't want to go crazy, and you need to talk about it with someone who doesn't naturally assume that you are crazy for talking about it.

When Katagiri had first met the Kurosaki girl she had thought that Masaki was the most beautiful, talented, and charming girl that Katagiri had ever met. It took time to see how broken Masaki was and how living with the Ishida's seemed to keep her trapped in this cycle of depression. She came to the Ishida house sad, which made it hard for her to succeed because she was so depressed, which caused the lady of the house to scold her, which made her more depressed. Masaki was still clearly a wonderful girl, but she and Ryuuken couldn't carry much of a conversation without somehow making everything worse. Katagiri liked that she could help them even if by only offering a sympathetic ear. In Katagiri's mind, yes she helped cook and clean, but she was really there to make sure that the people who keep her safe got to enjoy a little happiness in their lives. So she always paid attention to what Masaki thought of the food. She would stop by the mistress's room with a progress report because the lady of the house sometimes desperately needed to hear that something was going according to plan and that there were people in the house that cared about her. Lastly, she would listen to the smartest, funniest, strongest, most devastatingly handsome boy she knew tell her all about his problems. Katagiri loved her job.


End file.
